EnterNet 300 1.11 weirdness under OS 9.1/9.2.1

ElDiabloConCaca

U.S.D.A. Prime
Please help! Southwestern Bell told me that since my hard drive is partitioned and I'm running a "dual-boot" system, they cannot help me. They only provide technical support for those running one partition. Besides, I've already tried everything... ACK!

After partitioning my 10 GB hard drive (5GB: OS 9, 5GB: OS X) and re-loading OS 9.1 and X, my DSL connection has exhibited some WEIRD symptoms under OS 9. OS X's PPPoE works flawlessly, and I can surf all day and night with it... however, I am using EnterNet 300 1.11 under OS 9 to connect with the DSL modem... it USED to work, but after partitioning/reloading my hard drive, it will only let me make one initial connection to a website/FTP site/pop mailbox and then it'll refuse to connect to any other place.

For example, I can connect with EnterNEt 300, go to www.apple.com, watch the page load, type (oh, forgive me!) www.microsoft.com and after about a minute of "trying" to connect, Internet Explorer will return a "failed to connect to: www.***.com" message. Or, I can get mail from one pop mailbox, then load up IE and try to go to a webpage, and it's a no go... or, I can connect, load up "Software Update," let it look for new updates, but it won't download them (that's one too many connections: one to receive the list of updates, another to download the updates. Connection 1 works fine [receive list of updates]. Connection 2 [the download of the updates] fails as described).

OS X, fine. OS 9, weird. SWBell's help desk says that the partitioning of the hard drive is what's screwing it up. I'm tempted to believe them since it started happening right around the time I reformatted/repartitioned. I used to have OS 9/OS X on the SAME partition and everything worked. 2 partitions = no go in OS 9.

Any ideas? I've already gone through the hassle of reformatting/reloading/trashing prefs, etc etc etc... I've even loaded a FRESH system and nothing but EnterNet 300 1.11 and the same results occur. I'm at my wit's end.
 
Hello,

Your first mistake was telling the tech-sheet reading policy driven folks at SWB that your machine varies from their idea of "standard". The chaotic Windows world drives this mentality. Anyways...

Partitioning the drive has nothing to do with the problem!

Enternet is nothing more than a PPPoE login application. The TCP control panel selects it as the source. The application in turn selects the hardware and intercepts when login issues arise. Airport Base Stations and nearly any other router (gateway, firewall) worth its weight in cat litter does PPPoE logins.

About three weeks late this summer the SWB Domain Name Server (DNS) searches took forever (about thirty seconds at times). The DNSs are the computers at your ISP that translate the readable and registered names (www.apple.com) to the numeric IP address (192.168.1.1). The tech support guys gave me some server addresses to "hard code" into my settings. The speed improved. Sometime a couple weeks ago the problem just disapeared in its entirety. Speed is back to normal.

Of course I didn't tell them I was running a 3 partitioned dual boot iBook sitting behind two routers (wireless and land line)! They would not have helped. Sorry I don't mean to keep harping on this one but its a fustration point of mine as well :)

Back to your problem.
Do you have the latest OS 9.2.1 and Enternet?

Is Enternet actually logging you out after your first connection? When you are logged out you still have a DSL signal but the ISP services are unavailable.

You may want to buy an inexpensive router. That way your computer is nothing but a LAN client and the router interfaces with DSL. The router will do the login (and stay logged in) and act as a firewall. This basically transferes the responsibilities from your computer to a dedicated non-error-prone peice of hardware :)

The router should have
PPPoE for compatibility with SWB
NAT/DHCP. This is the firewall. Basically the IP address of your computer is unknown to the outside world.
IP Forwarding. This is the gateway. It can open certain doors through the firewall. This is useful if you want to serve anything (including peer-to-peer video conferincing, web sites, and etc).

The airport base station is a fully capable router.

Let me know how it goes.
 
Back
Top